Offering a “free report” in order to get visitors to sign up to your email list has definitely seen it’s day in the sun. With more marketers getting into email marketing by the day, the average internet user is seeing more and more boring optin forms, and is losing interest fast.

Good marketers are always looking for ways to stand out, and offer their visitors something of unusual value, therefore increasing their success, whether it be in making sales, leads, or converting optins. When it comes to building a list, and creating an image for your subscribers as being someone of high value right from the start, software can be an excellent choice.

The advantage of software is that you don’t have to ask your visitors to commit to supplying their name and email right away. You can simply offer them the download link, and only once they have installed the software will the optin be required in order to “register” their freeware.

If you want to see an example of this, checkout the sidebar of this blog where you can download a copy of WEB STATS NINJA, and see the process at work.

There are several advantages to this, so lets talk about why this is so damn powerful.

Firstly, it’s always great to get your visitor to make as many small commitments to you as possible. This is all part of building a relationship with your visitor/email subscriber, and even getting your visitor to take small actions such as clicking a link, or downloading an exe file, can help you to engage your potential subscribers. This is why on some long style sales pages, you will notice that they have tick boxes, asking the visitor to “tick if they want these benefits” and such. Interacting with your visitors and subscribers is huge in terms of the quality of the relationship you build, the success of your marketing, and therefore your bottom line.

The second very very cool thing about using software to gain subscribers, is that you have an added option of displaying advertising within your software. So if you want to have a “tab” in your software that shows your blog for whatever niche you are in, that’s an option. You can even have small links within the software which are your affiliate links, etc. (again, see my WEB STATS NINJA software in the sidebar for a working example)

Not only that, but you can also use the software as a communication tool in itself. So not only are you building a list, but you also have a secondary method of communicating with your downloaders/subscribers.

I hope this has given you a few ideas so far, because as you can see, software is HUGELY powerful in terms of building your email lists.

Oh, and by the way, I haven’t even gone into the distribution of software yet, just think what might happen if you developed a nice, high value software program for your niche, and then used the thousands of software directories to distribute your software. You might get a few downloads at least :) . Anyway, more on distribution in another post, I haven’t tested this yet, and I’m not one to write “How To” posts about something I haven’t actually done.

Take care and stay tuned

-Nick